ICE Obligates $3.75M Initial Funding on a $9.2M Clearview AI Follow-On Contract (Sept 2025) as DHS Is Reported to Have Removed Its Facial-Recognition Directive

Date kind: this entry is dated 2025-10-31, the date Biometric Update reported both facts. The contract award itself was September 5, 2025 (covered in 2025-09-09–ice-awards-9-million-facial-recognition-contract-to-clearview-ai) and the website removal of the directive was February 2025. It was previously filed as 2026-06-20, which is not a date any cited source supports.

ICE awarded Clearview AI a follow-on facial-recognition contract on September 5, 2025, with an initial obligation of $3.75 million toward a total value reported at $9.2 million, after a September 2024 purchase order with a ceiling of about $1.1 million (Biometric Update, October 31, 2025; see also 2025-09-09–ice-awards-9-million-facial-recognition-contract-to-clearview-ai). The same reporting says DHS removed the text of Directive 026-11, “Use of Face Recognition and Face Capture Technologies” (issued September 2023), from its public website in February 2025; DHS officials said the removal reflected routine website maintenance, not a policy change, and the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board’s May 9 staff report noted the deletion and that DHS “did not clarify whether DHS Directive 026-11 still applies.” This entry earlier dated both events to June 2026 and called the contract the largest-ever; neither claim is in its sources.

The contract sits in the biometric stack the timeline tracks: it follows the September 2025 award and 2026-02-11–cbp-clearview-ai-facial-recognition-contract (FedScoop’s report on CBP’s separate “tactical targeting” contract, February 11, 2026), layered atop the iris-scanner buildout in 2026-05-29–ice-bi2-iris-scanner-25m-no-bid-contract-biometric-database and the 300M-profile OBIM consolidation in 2025-08-14–obim-centralized-under-dhs-cio-mccord-biometric-database-300-million-profiles. The oversight-policy deletion is the accountability-elimination move that accompanies the capability buildout; Clearview supplies the face layer that Palantir’s ImmigrationOS integrates, assembled contract by contract.